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Competitor Claims

About BladeCenter and System x

IBM BladeCenter and System x are designed for a broad set of client needs from large enterprises to general businesses and high performance computing. IBM's line of x86 systems are backed by hundreds of patents and 100 number one performance benchmarks over the last 10 years. During that time, IBM invested a half a billion dollars in X-Architecture innovations. The result has been a very strong position, particularly in scalable systems. For example, according to IDC, in 2007 IBM continued to dominate the high-end scalable x86 market with more than 60% share, three times more than its closest competitor.

• Our System x Server just became the first single x86 system to burst through the 1 million transactions per minute barrier with the TPC-C benchmark.
• IBM BladeCenter® uses up to 50 percent less floor space and up to 35 percent less energy than competitor rack servers without sacrificing performance.
• We believe nobody matches the range of operating systems and processors of our Blades. Our clients are able to mix and match five blade chassis and 13 blade server types with six different operating systems – far more than any other blade vendor.

Claim: HP says that Blade.org is nothing more than a business partner program to promote IBM BladeCenter -- all cleverly packaged in the guise of an open standards body.

The industry disagrees.

• In a recent research note, IDC analyst Jed Scaramella wrote, “Even though the consortium was spearheaded by IBM, Blade.org has grown into a successful stand-alone industry organization. Evidence of this is that many of the collaborative solutions that have been developed do not involve IBM.”¹
• Through blade.org, we opened up our BladeCenter architecture to help companies build new products for the blade market. Over 500 companies have downloaded the open specification and have built network and storage cards, switches and software. Blade.org is helping them do this at lower design costs – with lower costs for buyers.
• More than 50 top-tier venture capital firms have invested nearly $1 billion in Blade.org member companies.
• Just recently, MetLife, Morgan Stanley and CBS Television joined blade.org